He’s Overqualified, She’s Highly Committed: Gender, Qualifications, and Perceptions of Firm and Career Commitment in Hiring Decisions

Hiring managers make inferences from signals to determine if job candidates are capable and committed to performing the job to which they are applying. We take a mixed-methods approach combining 3 experiments and qualitative analysis of justifications used in hiring decisions to provide evidence that candidates’ qualifications are used to make gender-stereotyped inferences about their commitment to their careers and to the prospective firm to which they have applied to work. Results showed that overqualified male job candidates were perceived to be less likely to be committed to the prospective firm (Studies 1-2) compared to men with fewer, but sufficient, qualifications for the position. However, overqualified female job candidates were seen as more committed to their careers and the prospective firm (Studies 1-2) than sufficiently qualified women, but only when they were inferred to be leaving firms that did not provide them with equal advancement opportunities (Study 3). These findings have important implications for understanding how gender-stereotyped assumptions about job candidates’ commitment impacts men’s and women’s experiences in the labor market.